We are very happy to announce the release of Radium SmartChain v3.2! The main new feature included in this update is blockchain voting. We at Radium believe that having voting verified on a blockchain is an extremely exciting and important aspect of blockchain technology.

Radium Elections — The return of confidence, transparency, and accountability to the voting experience

From the time voting was first Introduced in Greece by Cleisthenes in 508 BC, through today, voting has served as the cornerstone of the democratic decision making process. Unfortunately, many voting systems have been difficult to secure and scale, leading to modern recounts, contested results, and accusations of fraud. Now, 2525 years after the first known vote, Radium Core is happy to announce Radium elections, a blockchain based voting platform designed to restore confidence, transparency, and integrity to the voting process.

Using a combination of Blockchain technology and asymmetric key pair identity management, Radium voting provides a transparent, integrated, and easily validated voting platform. All election data and votes are recorded on-chain, allowing for near-time observation, counting, and verification by any third party running the SmartChain application.

Radium elections are designed for applications ranging from project management and club votes, to political elections and shareholder voting. We at Radium believe that simple, reliable and secure voting systems are a cornerstone of free governance. The Radium Elections platform will be available to anyone who has registered an identity on the Radium SmartChain. While the development team will be using this platform for Radium blockchain and SmartChain governance, everyone can hold an election, on any topic or for any purpose, at anytime.

In a drive to further decentralize and democratize the Radium network, the Radium Core team has decided that all major changes to the Radium Core and SmartChain protocols will be voted on using the new SmartChain voting functionality. The community will then have a period of time to participate in the vote, and the outcome of the vote will be used to determine whether the proposed change will be implemented on the protocol or not. When possible, new protocol changes will be released as dormant code, that must be activated by a predetermined threshold of approval votes. This way the community will have a direct impact on what is included and active in the Radium SmartChain.

Technical Discussion

A Radium election will consist of a title, description, open and close date/block, and up to 200 candidates. Each election will be open for voting for the time period between the open and close block number. Elections can be created so that voting will open in the future, allowing the creator to setup the election in advance. Real time voting results can be viewed while voting is in progress and final results will be available immediately after the election closes. The election results, including individual votes, will remain secured in the Radium Blockchain and visible indefinitely. Votes are not anonymous, and are linked to the SmartChain identity from which they were cast. Each identity can only vote once, and votes can not be changed after the vote is cast.

Upon creation, the election data is compressed and encoded into a hexadecimal smart transaction. For indexing and lookup purposes, an election ID is generated from a truncated ripemd160 hash of the transaction ID. Ripemd160 was chosen because it creates a correct sized hash, so that votes can be cast by a single output starttransaction. When a user votes, the aforementioned election ID and the index of the chosen vote is encoded together, and sent to the network. During syncing and operation, the SmartChain maintains a database of elections based on the ID, and parses incoming vote transactions, assigning the votes to the elections based on ID, and incrementing vote counts based on the vote index. The identity of the voter is determined by a lookup of the public key signing the election/vote SmartTransacition against the SmartChain’s internal database of registered identities.

A note about ICOs

As you all know we did not pursue an ICO when we started this project. In retrospect we believe this has worked in our favour. We have no legal doubts or liability which means events like the recent PBOC ICO ban or the SEC guidance regarding ICOs does not affect us as a developer team, our community or the Radium project.

As always, members of the development team are active on telegram and happy to answer any questions or trouble shoot any issues that may arise.